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Mutton Soup
Mrs. Whitehead.
Boil a leg of mutton three hours; season to your taste with salt and pepper, and add one teaspoon of summer savory; make a batter of one egg, two tablespoons of milk, two tablespoons of flour, all well beaten together; drop this batter into the soup with a spoon, and boil for three minutes.
A plain boiled-meat broth finished with egg-batter drops, of the kind that fed a family from one joint. The original gives no water quantity and no yield, so both need judgement.
- The water is left to youNothing in the recipe says how much liquid. A 4-5 lb leg wants enough cold water to cover by two inches, roughly 5-6 quarts in a tall stockpot, which after three hours reduces to a well-flavoured broth. Start cold so the scum rises and can be skimmed.
- Mutton means an older sheepMutton is sheep older than a year, usually reckoned at two years or more, stronger and fattier than lamb, and it is rare in American markets. A leg of lamb will substitute but is milder and cooks faster; lamb shoulder or shank, being tougher and more sinewy, comes closer to the intended flavour and stands up to three hours.
- Three hours is for the meat, not the brothSimmer, never boil hard, or the broth turns cloudy and the meat stringy. At a bare tremble the leg will be falling from the bone in two and a half to three hours; lamb may be done in two.
- Skim and degreaseMutton throws a great deal of fat. Skim during cooking, and if you can, chill the strained broth so the fat sets and lifts off in a sheet. Many nineteenth-century soup recipes call for skimming in so many words; this one simply leaves it unsaid.
- Summer savoryA peppery, thyme-adjacent herb that was a kitchen-garden staple and is now mostly sold dried. The teaspoon is probably dried; if you use fresh, treble it. Thyme with a pinch of marjoram is the nearest substitute.
- The batter is a drop dumplingOne egg, two tablespoons milk, two tablespoons flour makes a loose batter, closer to spaetzle than to a suet dumpling, and it yields only a small handful of drops. Triple it if you want dumplings throughout a pot of soup for six.
- Three minutes is rightEgg batter dropped into simmering broth sets almost at once; longer and it toughens. Keep the soup at a steady simmer so the drops firm before they disperse.
- ServingLift the leg out, carve the meat from the bone, and return it to the pot in pieces rather than serving the joint whole in the tureen. A leg this size, with the broth, feeds six to eight.
Boiled mutton broth is a long-established working-class dish in the English-speaking kitchen, and it survives in The Home Cook Book (a Chicago charity compilation of the 1870s, built from recipes signed by named contributors like Mrs. Whitehead) because it was one way a household could turn a cheap joint into two meals: meat for the table, broth for the soup plate. Summer savory marks it as a garden-herb recipe rather than a spice-box one; savory was easy to grow and dry, and it appears constantly in American cookbooks of the period alongside sage and thyme. The egg-batter drops belong to a family of quick soup garnishes that runs from German Eierstich and spaetzle to Scots and English "drop dumplings" -- flour and egg being always to hand where a beef marrow dumpling or a pastry crust would not be worth the trouble.